Government Computer News
The human touch
HR apps foster employee development with self-service, recruitment and analytics
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If human resources departments haven’t always emphasized the human element of their work, traditional HR management systems have barely tried.
Most legacy systems, many of them homegrown and outdated, generally support payroll processing and core functions such as benefits administration, and time and attendance.
But in recent years, new applications have supported the kinds of strategic planning and development that HR managers were trying to implement in low-tech ways. Now, that revolution in the corporate world is hitting government.
Agencies increasingly use automated recruiting and resume-processing apps, for example, to quickly find new employees and build individual electronic profiles for managing people as organizational resources.
Performance management processes, once a nightmare of complicated paper forms and tedious job reviews, are now facilitated online, tying top-down agencywide performance goals to the job reviews of the most junior employees.
“You need some kind of strategic management capability that cascades down to people,” said Harry West, a product manager for SAP America Inc., which makes MySAP Human Resources software.
“HR is about counting heads,” says Jason Averbook, director of global product marketing for PeopleSoft Inc., a major HR vendor to government. “Human capital management is about making heads count.”
American Management Systems Inc., Oracle Corp., PeopleSoft and SAP—the four biggest vendors of enterprise resource planning applications for government—are the main players in modern HRMS. They provide most of the functionality that counties, large municipalities, states and federal agencies need.
By incorporating business processes such as benefits management, recruiting and training administration that have been the bailiwick of outsourcers or third-party software vendors, the ERP bigwigs are likely to attract more government HR business, analysts predict.
Faster hiring
But a few niche vendors continue to hold sway, especially in recruiting. The Resumix division of Yahoo Inc., for example, helped 130 Minnesota state agencies using a centralized hiring center halve the time they took to fill positions. The Defense Department and NASA use Resumix.
Jim Holincheck, a research director for Gartner Inc. of Stamford, Conn., considers talent management products to be the second major category of HR software, behind traditional HRMSes and ERP products.
The coexistence of soup-to-nuts ERP products with more specifically targeted software causes both cooperation and competition between the two, and requires agency IT buyers to make difficult choices.
Federal HR systems now take their marching orders from recent government accountability and performance initiatives, especially the President’s Management Agenda. “It’s forced them to look at their business processes—something they weren’t doing before,” says John Goggin, vice president and director of government strategies at META Group Inc. of Stamford, Conn.
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